When Nokia CEO Justin Hotard took the stage at the opening of the vendor’s research campus in Oulu, Finland earlier this year, he spoke about something more profound than you might typically find at a ribbon-cutting ceremony. There, alongside Finnish President Alexander Stubb, the Nokia CEO called on European lawmakers to remove “high-risk vendors” from the continent's core networks.
A bold move, calling out the likes of Huawei and ZTE at an event that, for all intents and purposes, was meant to usher in its new ‘home of radio.’ But when said alongside President Stubb, Hotard’s words had extra weight. The Finnish leader has been a leading voice among Europeans trying to keep U.S. President Donald Trump on side and focused on what he claims is the real global issue – that the global East “wants to change the world order.”
The topic of Chinese vendors and their impact on radio access networks (RAN) found its way onto the higher echelons of the White House agenda during Trump’s first presidency, culminating in a trade war and global tensions so warm you’d think it was the early 1980s.
Now into his second term, the halls of Trump’s government feature a mixture of faces, new and old. And yet, the geopolitical specter that has long haunted RAN appears to have slipped from the spotlight.
Just how much has the concept of open RAN and the politics surrounding it evolved? And given vendors like Nokia are facing the prospect of being excluded from China over national security reasons, has the geopolitical wrangling over mobile network architectures already come to a head?
The great disaggregation experiment
If you cast your mind back to 2016, and the inception of open RAN, it was all about creating an open and disaggregated network infrastructure, as well as related interfaces, and equipment that power wireless networks.
In February 2018, the concept was then formalized through the formation of the O-RAN Alliance, with the likes of Airtel, Orange, Vodafone, and T-Mobile US leading the effort.
Just a year later, and it was then-President Trump who would thrust the project into the limelight, banning both Huawei and ZTE from U.S. telecom networks – and ultimately opening the door to potential open RAN solutions to replace the now ousted equipment.
The promise? Straightforward: Open RAN would democratize the radio access network market, breaking the stranglehold of the so-called Big Three: Ericsson, Nokia, and Huawei – while also giving operators more flexibility and driving down costs through interoperability. And for those China-skeptic Western policymakers, it offered the additional benefit of shifting away from Chinese equipment and infrastructure, without simply swapping one monopolistic vendor for another.
In reality, the potential waned. Despite the U.S.’s $3 billion rip-and-replace program to remove Huawei and ZTE equipment from its networks, open RAN deployments ended up limited. While promising conceptually, operators found disaggregated networks brought with them integration challenges, performance concerns, and upfront costs that made the transition less appealing than anticipated.
The initial wave of enthusiasm began to temper as carriers realized that swapping out Chinese vendors often meant turning to Nokia and Ericsson, the very incumbents open RAN was supposed to disrupt.
Stefan Pongratz, VP for RAN market research at Dell'Oro Group, put it bluntly: open RAN simply hasn't delivered on its core economic promise.
“Operators prioritize total cost of ownership (TCO),” he explained. “If there is an architecture that can help them be more efficient, reduce capex/opex, and improve their hand in future discussions, they are interested. Given that open RAN accounted for about a mid-single-digit share of the H1 2025 RAN market, it is safe to conclude open RAN is not delivering any noticeable TCO savings.”
So has open RAN failed?
It’s a question that gets bandied about at conferences (and may be mentioned a bit more in this Supplement).
Jacob Shapiro, the director of research at the Bespoke Group, seems to think so. He likened open RAN to more of a geopolitical slogan than a technical revolution, with its momentum stalling due to a lack of U.S. government support.
In more recent years, he argued that U.S. government interest in open RAN has declined, largely due to the lack of “China hawks” with prominent anti-China voices from Trump’s first term, like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, absent this time around.
“It’s very clear that President Trump wants to deal with China and doesn’t want to cause problems,” the analyst said. “He wants to create some kind of superficial deal and claim victory and go on to the next episode of the reality TV show.”
While some politicians might frame open RAN instead as what Shapiro coined “Not-China RAN,” the reality is that Nokia and Ericsson have since stepped up to replace the Huawei-sized hole.
But the “dirty little secret” had open RAN succeeded in plugging that gap? In Shapiro’s view, it’s that China still would have come out on top.
“China is the one that makes the switches and the actual hardware that goes into [network equipment],” Shapiro contended. “A lot of folks who were supporting open RAN in the U.S told themselves the story that the U.S. leads in software, which meant they were going to be the ones setting the standards. But the truth of the matter is, if everyone adopted open RAN, then Chinese companies would be the ones that would build all of the best and cheapest hardware.”
Success is, of course, a concept that’s hard to determine in the tech space, especially as mobile network architectures routinely evolve. While Dell'Oro Group’s Pongratz pointed out that prioritizing costs has been the driving factor behind operators choosing whether or not to take up open RAN solutions, the core desire for flexibility still holds weight.
“[The Open Fronthaul (OFH) interface] is increasingly a requirement, partly because operators want to have more options,” the analyst outlined. “They don’t necessarily want to work with more suppliers, but they want to have more options than just Huawei, Ericsson, and Nokia.
“While open RAN is not plug-and-play, the OFH compliance is a step in the right direction, and it is also an insurance premium in case there is more M&A activity. This is important because RAN vendor concentration is on the rise. In addition, operators might have accepted that the multi-vendor radio baseband is not happening, but they do see possible value with rApps.”
In other words, operators are not adopting multi-vendor RAN for baseband/radio because it doesn't significantly reduce the total cost of ownership. But that doesn’t mean they don’t want the key pillars that form the basis of what open RAN stands for: automation, virtualization, and openness.
A new geopolitical priority
While open RAN may have dominated the discourse when President Trump first took office, another technological priority has taken precedence in his second term: AI.
According to Shapiro, AI has usurped 5G and open RAN in the geopolitical zeitgeist, with once-promised intelligence vulnerabilities, like Chinese-orchestrated backdoors in network switches, failing to materialize in the dramatic fashion of the earlier political theater.
But AI represents an altogether different kind of competition. Where 5G was about control of infrastructure and oftentimes physical assets, AI is more akin to a cognitive dominance – with questions about who is setting the standards for machine intelligence and encoding their ethics into algorithms.
To bring it full circle then, that topic is already at the forefront of the concerns of European leaders like Finland’s Alexander Stubb, with AI the proverbial backbone of the continent’s cry for digital sovereignty in a bid to reduce not only its reliance on China, but the U.S. as well.
“There's an awakening in Europe that's happening,” Shapiro suggested, pointing to Germany's growing distrust of U.S. reliability and Macron's long-championed concept of digital sovereignty finally gaining traction.
“Europe has decided it has to play catch-up, because if it doesn't, they’re either going to be beholden to a U.S. that does not have our interests at its heart anymore, or they’re going to have to be dealing with China.”
Somewhat ironic then, that open RAN was meant to break vendor lock-in and reduce dependence on Chinese infrastructure, only for fears of an even more indiscernible technological divide to emerge from its ashes.
And yet, the two aren't entirely separate. AI was, in fact, another of the key pillars that Dell'Oro's Pongratz suggested would help shape the basis of next-generation RAN platforms and architectures.
Automation and intelligence promised by AI-driven network management through rApps that operators still see value in, may yet deliver what open RAN's hardware disaggregation didn’t – genuine flexibility and cost savings.
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